Victoria Pendleton

or it could just be ££££££ spent on more advertising, p.r, and promotion of power generation from open coal mines and other filthy short term solutions,

It coudl be but I suspect it isn't. Yes EDF have a bad reputation and yes some of this is PR, but if you take a look objectively at the whole Green Britain Day campaign, very little of it is about how great EDF is and the vast proportion of it is about encouraging and empowering the public to make behavioural change towards and more energy efficient and energy economic future. Certainly not one mention of how great it is to mine coal and produce CO2. It just isn't in there at all.

yes, the intentions might be good but dont kid yourself, the winners are the shareholders, we need better integrated policies on energy, not greenwash bollocks from large companies that have the ultimate aim of profit written in to their very legal constitution.

An energy company encouraging people to use less energy benefits the shareholders. Yeah, I can see where you're going with this. OK, sarcasm aside, it's true, EDF may end up looking better than they do now, but will that really attract customers? Credible opinion suggests it won't. The market is still largely driven by prices and the big six don't attract customers without keeping their prices very close to each other. Frankly I don't care about the profits, but then I think that there is a place for responsible capitalism. If people make some behavioural change off the back of this, I don't care if EDF make a bazillion pounds out of it, although I rather doubt they will. You're making a rather sweeping use of the term greenwash, perhaps you're suffering from cynicalwash?

what is a greener national identity? sounds like greenwash bollocks........

Thanks, I coined the term myself. A greener national identity is one where we, as a nation, identify with the pursuit of a more energy efficient and energy economic lifestyle. Certainly something that we don't do at the moment. Sure there are a lot of campaigns around at the moment, but none of them really have the full national impact that is truly desirable for a sustainable future. Wrapping this up in a green pass of the Union Jack and with a bunch of respected and recognisable celebrities taps into a key part of social function, the desire to be part of something greater than ourselves and generally not be different.

dosent being green constitute what you actually do, act, live?

Absolutely, and I'm guessing that is why so much of Green Britain Day is about that all important behavioural change.

This isn't a defence of EDF as a whole, just this one campaign, that generally won't benefit them a great deal other to fix them a bit more as a brand in that national conciousness. Yes, I think they should be doing more in their practices and yes, I think we need better integrated energy policies. Although policies are the reserve of politicians who use the environment as a political weapon so I don't think you can fairly slap EDF with that particular brickbat.

Yes, I wish someone else with more environmental credibility had come up with this idea and had the funding to back it and promote it on this scale, but they didn't. That doesn't really leave me frowning at EDF, but wondering why everyone else was so fucking useless in the first place. Maybe I'll have to concede on the greenwash part, but I'm more interested in the end result. More people aware of energy issues and more people making an effort to use less energy? If so, that is absolutely brilliant. From there it isn't such a great leap to them wondering where their energy comes, something that they probably aren't doing right now. That in itself will have an impact on EDF's business.